Recent hardware and software advancements have enabled wireless computing devices to simultaneously execute a variety of applications. For example, popular mobile device operating systems can be configured to concurrently execute a number of applications such that a user can, for example, quickly access his or her email, check the weather, and check stock prices through simple touch gestures made on a display of his or her wireless computing device. In general, and mainly due to the limited display size of wireless computing devices, mobile operating systems manage a single “foreground” application and many “background” applications. A user, through interaction with his or her wireless computing device, can cause a foreground application to become a background application, and vice-versa. In some cases, background applications—despite not being visible to the user on the display—continue to execute and provide background functionality to the user. For example, a music streaming application can be configured to play music even when the user places the application into a background state. Other examples include an email application and a stock application that are each configured to periodically (e.g., every ten minutes) check for updates even when executing in the background.
Although the foregoing techniques enhance overall user experience, they also provide new challenges with respect to power management within wireless computing devices. In particular, power consumption of a wireless computing device generally scales with the total number of data requests made by background applications. Moreover, when combined with additional power demands associated with new baseband radios being included in wireless computing devices—such as those that are compatible with Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks—significant decreases are seen in the overall uptime that the wireless computing device can provide to the user on a single battery charge. One attempt to mitigate this problem targets the manner in which the radio system accesses LTE networks, and is referred to as “discontinuous reception” (DRX) mode. As is well-known, DRX mode involves reducing the duty cycle of transceivers included in the radio system and increases overall downtime of the radio system, thereby saving power. Unfortunately, however, existing radio systems are configured to immediately respond to any data request generated by an application (either in the foreground or the background), which disrupts and reduces scheduled radio downtime when operating in DRX mode. As a result, the amount of radio downtime that would normally occur in DRX mode is reduced and overall expected power savings is reduced.